Along the river and toward the mountains a morning shadow shimmers across the road. The rays of the first light jet through the trees and across a figure gliding upon the road. His breath trails in short spurts, petrified as it hits the icy air. All is quiet except the slight sound of the athlete as he summons himself for yet another days work. Soon the rest of the world will bustle with life as well and the brief simplicity of cyclist and nature will disappear into the everyday struggle of life in full motion; the errands and intervals, the appointments and intersections, and the deadlines and finish lines OutPaceTheRace

Monday, January 08, 2007

Passing the time

North Bend, WAMonday, January 08, 2007

I'm not sure how to phrase this, but I’ve noticed that time has different dimensions… so to speak. For instance, if you do an interval at 450 watts, you’ll notice that 5 seconds take about 5 minutes. Yesterday when I was doing a series of intervals I was glancing between my stopwatch and my power meter trying to keep an eye on the amount of power I was putting out and the amount of time left in the interval when I made a startling discovery… As I switched my focus from my stopwatch to my power meter, I jumped into a different dimension of time… Seriously, I think most people notice this, but never realize it. In each 5 seconds of any given high intensity interval, your level of concentration is at least 10 times that of your normal state of mind. In the time it took to glance from my stopwatch to my power meter and back I had processed the same amount of information and deliberated upon it as I would have in 10 minutes. I mean really, how many times have you jogged for ten minutes and thought “wow, I could’ve sworn I’ve been jogging for two hours!” Of course that’s not quite the same because with each level of exertion your body requires an additional level of concentration. But now, think about this, how many times have you sat down to watch TV at 5:00pm and ten minutes later realized it’s almost 12:00pm? So here’s the quantum theory part, what if you could go into TV mode while you’re doing that 450 watt interval???